Dalit Protest in Gujarat
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Repression of Dalits has been rampant in Gujarat and the state also ranks high in terms of atrocities against them. The recent brutal attack on Dalit youths unjustly accused of cow slaughter is an open expression of simmering casteist prejudices under the cover of supporting the Hindutva agenda.
The state of Gujarat was supposed to be a model worthy of emulation. This was the tall claim of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which has governed the state since 2001. The BJP however considers laudable what is actually shameful. Four Dalit youths were publicly flogged by a Hindutvavadi vigilante group on 11 July. Members of the Gau Raksha Samiti came across a Dalit family skinning the carcass of a dead cow in village Mota Samadhiyala in Una taluka of Gir Somnath district. Accusing them of cow slaughter, these men beat up the entire family and then picked up the four youths, stripped them up to the waist, chained them to the back of a car and drove it to Una town, where they were again beaten up close to a police station. The gau rakshaks, confident that they would not be punished, filmed the entire act and uploaded the video on the internet. However, this last act of theirs backfired, as enraged Dalits came out on the streets in protest and there was condemnation from many quarters. This atrocity exposed how emboldened anti-Dalit elements in Gujarat have become to unleash their prejudices under the guise of supporting the government’s Hindutva agenda.
Modi’s Crocodile Tears
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it is said, was “disturbed” on learning about what had happened. This seemed to imply that he has never heard of atrocities on Dalits in Gujarat before. He must surely know that Gujarat has the dubious distinction of consistently ranking among the top five states in terms of atrocities against Dalits. In 2013, even as Modi was on the verge of being designated as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, the number of atrocities per 1,00,000 Scheduled Caste (SC) persons was 29.21, up from 25.23 in the previous years. This was disgraceful—Gujarat ranked fourth among India’s states in terms of the incidence of atrocities against Dalits. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) in earlier years erroneously mentioned the number of atrocities per lakh population and corrected it only in 2012. Therefore, the incidence of atrocities against the SCs as given in NCRB tables would necessitate correction in absolute figures. However, this is unlikely to alter Gujarat’s relative rank among the states. In terms of the major category of atrocities like murders and rapes too Gujarat ranks higher than most states. Table 1 provides the rates of these atrocities for 2012 and 2013 to show how Gujarat ranks high in the list of states for crimes against Dalits.
In September 2012, in Thangadh, a small town in Surendranagar district of Gujarat, three Dalit youths were gunned down by Modi’s police on two consecutive days (22 and 23 September 2012) but the then chief minister did not utter a word although he was barely 17 km away from the spot, leading a Vivekanand Youth Vikas Yatra. On the first day, the police opened fire on the Dalits protesting against the Bharwads, who had beaten a Dalit youth over a minor clash, seriously injuring 17-year-old Pankaj Sumra, who later died in a hospital in Rajkot. News of the death sparked outrage among Dalits who took to the streets demanding that a complaint be filed against the police officials responsible. The next day, the police again opened fire on the agitating Dalits injuring three of them, two of whom, Mehul Rathod, 17, and Prakash Parmar, 26, died at the Rajkot civil hospital. These killings, just before the state assembly polls in 2012, had sent shock waves across the state and complaints were lodged against four police officials. Investigation was handed over to the Crime Investigation Department. However, despite three FIRs being filed against the accused policemen, only in one case has a charge sheet been filed and one of the accused B C Solanki was not even arrested.
Pent-up Anger
Gujarat has a long history of feudal repression of its Dalit community, which being relatively small (7.1%) as compared to the national average of 16.6, had largely remained politically inert. After a brief show of strength by the Dalit Panthers in the early 1970s, they were rudely shaken out of their Gandhian slumber by the 1981 anti-reservation riots. For the first time, a spate of Ambedkar Jayanti celebrations were held all over the state. But this awakening proved to be short-lived. When the BJP realised the electoral importance of the Dalits and began wooing them, they succumbed and found themselves participating in a big way in the 1986 Jagannath rath procession and later, even becoming its foot soldiers particularly during the 2002 post-Godhra carnage of Muslims. However, nothing changed for them on the ground. The discrimination, humiliation, exploitation and atrocities continued unabated with a complicit state overtly or covertly backing the anti-Dalit elements in civil society.
A recent study has demonstrated that of all the atrocity cases that occurred across four districts in Gujarat, 36.6% were not registered under the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act (better known as the Atrocity Act). Where the act was applied, 84.4% were registered under the wrong provisions, thus concealing the intensity of the violence in the cases.1 Earlier, the Ahmedabad-based Council for Social Justice had studied 400 judgments delivered over a decade under this act since 1 April 1995 in the special atrocity courts set up in 16 districts of the state, and found wanton violation of the rules by the police to weaken prosecution. The judiciary also contributed its own prejudices to render the act toothless.2 No wonder, the conviction rate in atrocity cases in Gujarat is six times lower than the national average of over 10 years for crimes against the SCs and Scheduled Tribes (STs). In 2014 (latest available data), 3.4% of the crimes against SCs in Gujarat ended in convictions, against a comparable national rate of 28.8%—that is, one conviction for every eight across the country.
A study titled “Understanding Untouchability: A Comprehensive Study of Practices and Conditions in 1,589 villages,” conducted in Gujarat between 2007 and 2010, by the Navsarjan Trust, an organisation working among Dalits in Gujarat, in collaboration with the Robert E Kennedy Centre for Justice and Human Rights, revealed widespread practice of untouchability in rural Gujarat.3 The new generation of Dalits, faced with a dark future amidst the prosperity around, would not stomach it. It is this build-up of anger accentuated by the sugar-coated anti-Dalit policies of the BJP that burst out in the form of spontaneous flare-up of Dalit anger in the state.
BJP’s Killer Cow
At the root of this atrocity and consequent flare-up lies the suspicion of cow slaughter by the self-appointed vigilantes who directly derive their power from the latest push by the ruling BJP. This atrocity reminds one of the Jhajjar episode in Haryana, where on 15 October 2002 five Dalits were lynched and set ablaze by a Hindutva mob in front of the police station in Dulina on similar suspicions of cow slaughter. The police, instead of acting against the lynching, had registered a case against the victims under the Prevention of Cow Slaughter Act! The case was withdrawn only after the result of a post-mortem revealed that the cow had been dead 24 hours before the lynching. Only thereafter, two cases of murder and attempted murder were reluctantly registered against 32 villagers. No sooner were they arrested, all of them were out on bail by January despite being booked under stringent sections: murder, rioting with deadly weapons, mischief by fire and explosive substances (435) and under the SC and ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989. They bragged publicly that they would not mind doing it again. The Hindutva outfits openly justified it. On 28 September 2015, a Muslim family was attacked by similar vigilante mob in Bishahra village near Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, following rumours that it was storing and consuming beef. They lynched Mohammad Akhlaq and seriously wounded his son Danish. A case of cow slaughter has been registered against the family of Mohammad Akhlaq by the police at the instance of a local court in Surajpur!
The government unashamedly continues to ignore the directive principles of state policy in Part IV of the Constitution that were to be the fundamental principles of governance but uses the alibi of an Article to ban the slaughter of the entire cow family to the detriment of a vast majority of people and the economy. This obsession is certainly going to be the single biggest disaster for the country in the coming years but has become the immediate killer for the Muslims and Dalits, who are vocationally linked to and derive their livelihoods from the bovine economy.
The BJP may ignore its consequences only at its own peril.
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